All of us need something really wonderful to hold on to. What can be more glorious than to know that God loves us? Well, He does!

God is our Father and our Mother. God is Love. So Love is our Mother. With Love for our Mother, can we be unloved? Our Father-Mother Love has made man in His own image. Man is patterned in the very likeness of Love. Right now Love bathes man in tenderness. We can understand that we are in our real being Love's likeness, and put that understanding into practice. Love understood and demonstrated makes us loving and loved. And Love keeps us that way!

We hear a lot about the challenges of today's world and how we can meet them with healing. Spiritual understanding enables us to meet them consistently. But let's meet them joyously, too. Our Father-Mother Love helps us to do this. Divine Love sends us the angels we need to stay happy. We remember the angel that came to Daniel and strengthened him. To all who are obedient comes that same tenderly strengthening assurance: "O man greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee, be strong, yea, be strong." ^{Dan. 10:19.}

With such angelic encouragement, trials are less likely to get us down. Instead, they help us to understand God's healing power. When everything is running along smooth as a top, we're not always listening to God's angel messages. But when we're sick or in trouble, we have to listen. When we respond to these spiritual intuitions, we find out for sure that God really does love us—we could say that the "Michael" angels make us strong and the "Gabriel" angels keep us conscious of being loved.

The beloved Leader of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy, writes of these angels in Science and Health: "Michael's characteristic is spiritual strength. He leads the hosts of heaven against the power of sin, Satan, and fights the holy wars. Gabriel has the more quiet task of imparting a sense of the ever-presence of ministering Love. ... The Gabriel of His presence has no contests. To infinite, ever-present Love, all is Love, and there is no error, no sin, sickness, nor death." ^{Science and Health, pp. 566–567.}

The ninety-first Psalm tells us that these angels have charge! When we make God our refuge, His angels keep us "in the secret place" where we're sheltered and safe. In this secret place of refuge "there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." ^{Ps. 91:1, 10.} This secret place is a wonderful place to be. And it's available to everybody—not just a favored few. The price of admission is genuine trust in and obedience to God.

It's in this secret place that we pray: affirming God's allness, power, and goodness and man's perfection as Love's reflection, and denying that fear and hate, self-will and self-love, have any reality or power or intelligence. We pray to be patient and humble, loving and pure.

With God's help we can this very day be strong and happy. Whatever we need we can count on God to supply. Divine Mind gives us the wisdom to know what to say and do; when to be quiet and when to speak; when to act and when to be still. Obedience and trust wrap us up in God's love.

When our astronauts go into outer space, they go into an atmosphere that is hostile to human needs. So what do we do? We put them in a capsule or spaceship that's equipped with atmosphere congenial to their needs. And we see that they have whatever else they require, too.

Can't we count on God doing as much for us? Of course we can. And infinitely more! No matter where we are, we can hold to the spiritual facts of being: that man is always in the atmosphere of Love. That's our secret place, our refuge. Through living in accord with these facts we abide in that refuge.

Each time we overcome evil with the truth of perfect God and perfect man, our trust in God grows. Step by step, proof by proof, we become stronger.

Divine Love is constant. It was divine Love that inspired Christ Jesus' compassion. He loved the people he met—pitiful people who were sick and needy and without direction in their lives, bound by a theology so rigid that it even forbade healing on the Sabbath. ^{See Luke 14:1–5 .} But he didn't leave them where he found them. He healed them, supplied their needs, and offered them a life purpose—to go and do the works that he was doing. Christ Jesus proved that the power of God, Spirit, supersedes material restrictions.

And, in some measure, we can too! That's our lifework, our purpose: to follow the Master's example in healing, in meeting the needs in our own lives, the needs of our families, our communities, and our world. It is Love that impels us to this work.

To be equipped for this holy work, we must learn to love as Jesus loved. Spiritual understanding of the Christ, Truth, is vital to our success—and so are sincerity and purity and joy. Where do love and understanding and purity and joy come from? From God!

Man expresses all the love he needs because he reflects divine Love. He has all the understanding he needs because he manifests divine Mind. He is sincere—truthful—because he is the likeness of Truth. He is pure because he is governed by divine Principle. He is joyous because he is supplied with Soul's infinite resources.

When does man have love and understanding and truthfulness and purity and joy? Now! Always! And who is this man that is so wonderfully blessed? You are in reality that man! And so am I! Through understanding this we can prove it!

Abilities: unlimited.

Joy: unbounded.

Goal: to consecrate our lives to healing the world's troubles through the Christ, Truth.

The prophet Zechariah foresaw for God's people: "They shall be as the stones of a crown, lifted up as an ensign upon his land." ^{Zech. 9:16.} Isn't that wonderful? Yes, God does love us.